New audio stuttering thread [keep stuttering discussion in here]

[ElAguila]

..... This wouldn't be so frustrating if Valve actually had some communication with their own community. All we want to know is the status of the problem, what they're working on and what progress they are making. Even if they're not making any progress at all, we deserve to know. If they're not going to be able to balance out these issues then I'd at least like to get word so I can get a refund. The game simply isn't playable in this state.

I am sorry to say that you hit part of the problem right on. Valve has done a terrible job at communicating with the hl2 community. If valve would communitcate with its users there would be a lot less bitching in the forums, less frustration by the users, and an increase in the respectibility of valve. This policy of silence only adds fuel to the fire.
As far as the stuttering, I still have the issue after the patch and I have a radeon 9800 pro. I still think it is related to the miles sound. I have moh pacific assault installed. When I select miles for the sound option I get the same type of in game stuttering.

 

[None77]

So when the hell is the new "patch" coming out? The last one was a disaster. I'm so sick of freaking waiting.

Think about it though...if you were a company(shameless that is) would you even want to acknowledge your game has serious technical issues during the weeks of it's biggest sales? Bastards...

 

[BlackMesaDude]

I dont get it, on Shacknews there is one guy from valve posting, why the hell does he not post at the biggest half life 2 fansite ? its here we want valve to post, not shacknews geez...

 

[MotoR31]

Hmm, i think i just got banned from the steam forums, seems i voiced my oppinion on hl2 a bit loud.

Has the magic of this game died for anyone else, or is it just me? I dont even feel like playing it anymore...

 

[^Ben]

Then don't and GTFO from here aswell.

" This wouldn't be so frustrating if Valve actually had some communication with their own community"

Yah go onto every HL2 site there is? They have ackknowledged that there is a problem and they are fixing it.

What more do you want?

 

[polypod]

i'm hoping the tweakable nature of the game and the many mods on the way will lead to fixes and optimizations.. however i've already finished the game and now i'm replaying just to study how they designed the levels..
Lots of work, sometimes i think they use too many textures, but oh well..
I have good specs(9800 all-in-wonder, etc..) and get stutters quite often, although less with medium textures..

 

[^Ben]

It's a problem with the way the load textures within the engine.

Once this gets fixed it should be all good Textures galore for my maps

 

[klaviernista]

My plan is to wait until I've finished college this week on Wednesday & if Valve haven't said or done anything by then I'll try & HD format & re-install of XP & HL2 so theres nothing else on my system (apart from drivers of course). I'm curious to see if it will make any difference at all. I doubt it but what the hell - Be good to have another clean out!

This actually helped me out a lot. I posted about it in this thread

The reformat, reinstall was well worth it for me. The game runs flawlessly now, except for stuttering when the antialiasing settings are adjusted and for about a tenth of a second when a new area loads. Thats good enough for me!

 

[stavroshamster]

Hi everyone,
I think my stuttering problem got worse when the patch installed - Gmans intro got worse. The game is still playable though, for the most part, although I havent got past Ravenholm because I have been waiting for a proper fix so i dont know what its going to be like when i get into some bigger battles.
Does anyone know whether this nVidia patch is just supposed to help those with nVidia graphics? I have an ATI Radeon 9600XT but my mother board is an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe Nforce 2, which means my sound is all Nvidia driven. Is the patch designed to help just graphics users, or Nvidia audio users too?

 

[BlackMesaDude]

the nvidia bug could be both for all we know, i got both nvidia 6800 and nvidia nforce2 for sound, perhaps thats why im getting so terrible lag with this game.. only time will tell.

 

[howierd]

WHERE THE @#%^@^#@ HELL IS THE GODAMN @%@%@@^ NEW PATCH that is an actual FIX?!
GOD#!@^%@^#^@^@$ FU@#^%@^$ SHI@!^$#^@!

:bounce:

 

[^Ben]

Sorry there was an age limit on the game.

 

[TEDR]

This actually helped me out a lot. I posted about it in this thread

The reformat, reinstall was well worth it for me. The game runs flawlessly now, except for stuttering when the antialiasing settings are adjusted and for about a tenth of a second when a new area loads. Thats good enough for me!

i read that thread and this was written

Result: the sound still stutters when I change the antialiasing settings and when the game initially loads a new level (for about a 0.1-0.2 seconds, then its gone)

 

[TEDR]

i put half life 2 on new drive and defragment there is nothing on there but half life 2

its still stutters say 1-2 seconds not 0.1 - 0.2 and wont be happy until valve sort it out so there is no stutter at all!!!

 

[TEDR]

the question is why it stutter on my better system and the lesser system plays it great no stutter

 

[howierd]

Im probably older than you Mikey, otherwise I wouldnt have bleeped anything out.
I, as well as thousands of people are sitting here waiting for a patch for a game thats a year late, after being teased before thanksgiving that a patch would be here.
I have a right to vent, and Valve has a right to hear it.
Quite sad that one of the most awaited games in years is this screwed up.
This isnt a bug, this is a major issue that I doubt will be fixed.
I mean what the hell, they didnt have this issue the past year or three creating and TESTING the game?

Happy freakin holidays!

 

[wasted]

hey fellas,

wow, i finally managed NOT to check for a patch every 20 minutes and let HL2 rest for some days.

so what's new besides the good old thread died? are there still many ppl left with the bug? this thread seems so small. are there new console commands to check out? or anything (new drivers, anyone?? ) and where are those funny pictures? i hope the artists still suffer from that bug!! j/k

well, since you guys are still writing here I presume there's no 100% fix, and i might as well just go back hibernating

 

[^Ben]

"WHERE THE @#%^@^#@ HELL IS THE GODAMN @%@%@@^ NEW PATCH that is an actual FIX?!
GOD#!@^%@^#^@^@$ FU@#^%@^$ SHI@!^$#^@!

"

Im sorry i took those of the words of a 12 year old.

 

[ColdKodiak]

I tried out Opposing Force and it also stutters, while HL-Source does not.

Will probably try out CS-source, and original halflife too now.

 

[doomed - uk]

I took another look at the 20+ minutes of footage show at E3, and noticed 4 obvious stutters in the game during that time. 1 was at the Gman intro as usual and 3 were at the scene with Mossman, Eli Vance and Alyx.

I think stuttering is something Valve have been aware of for a long time. The question is did they know that for some people it was going to be as bad as it is?

 

[silentio]

Is valve talking about another patch to fix this stuttering problem, or do they consider this fixed/nonissue.

I have delayed playing this game for almost 2 weeks because of this problem, so if anyone has info on this

 

[^Ben]

"We are still investigating another performance problem on some hardware, which will manifest where the game is getting into a state where performance drops to less than 5 fps and does not recover or crashes"

I would assume they still are.

 

[MotoR31]

whoops

 

[gflolid]

Just had a major breakthrough in the stuttering audio problem.

I meant to check the DMA settings on my CDROMs under

Device Manager/IDE ATA Controllers/Primary IDE Channel

in the Control Panel, but looked at my hardrives by accident.

The hardrive I installed Half Life 2 (D on had changed from UDMA mode 6, to PIO. No idea why, but with all the copy protection in Half Life I would bet they are related.

I had to delete "Primary IDE Channel" under the "IDE ATA/Atapi Controllers" section in Device Manager. When Windows reinstalls the channel and harddrives it resets the UDMA to the proper level, UDMA 6 in my case.

My performance in Half Life 2 went from pathetic to excellent.
I know this is pretty simple stuff, but with all the other extreme things being suggested, it is worth a try.

Hopefully this works for others... Good luck!

 

[wasted]

my drives are at UDMA mode, so i cannot confirm this to be a 100% fix

 

[ElAguila]

My drives are in a raid 0 which is much faster than udma and I still have the problem.

 

[gordon13]

My Struggle

The Following is a time table of my half-life 2 “experience”

Tuesday Oct 19th 9:30am
Drove 15 miles and bought The Gordon Freeman cover copy of the CD set of Half Life 2 at a cost of 54.95 plus tax at a Best Buy.

9:45am- arrived home to my system of love and understanding, a hand-built Athlon 64 3400, VIA k8v-Deluxe, Brand New BFG 6800gt OC, Audigy 2 ZS, 1 gig of the good stuff Micron DDR-400 etc, etc.

9:50am- began to install HL2 with my 52x CDROM
9:59am- inserted disk 2
10:05am -disk 3
10:13am- disk 4
10:20am -disk 5

10:21am- inserted disk 1 for authentication
10:30am -16%
10:40am -62%
10:50am -62 %
11:00am -62% (I am now officially late to my Chem Lab, which I skip)
11:10am -79%
11:17am -100% (Woo Hoo)

11:18am- Steam, play games, Half life 2, Launch…. Preparing to launch….
BOOM. My Computer of love and understanding takes a dump of massive proportions. I get kicked out of windows, no program error, no blue screen of death; I get a complete restart back to my BIOS load screen. That not the bad news, once it checks my CD and DVD drives it fails to located my WD 7200rpm Raptor Hard Drive.

It is now 11:20 and I have had HL2 for almost two hours and I can’t even load windows

11:21am- I try in Vain to restart my computer, only to be defeated by the same error message every time. The definition of insanity is repeating the same task over and over and expecting a different result. After restarting my computer 20 times I take action.


11:24am- First I Unplug PC- this is a time consuming process all in all, three wires for my Klipsh Promedia’s, one for my Ethernet, Keyboard, USB Mouse, Game pad (Nostromo they rock) TV Tuner Cable, Back up hard drive, video in, sound out.

11:30am -I Reseat the Hard Drive disconnecting the IDE cable and reinserting it

11:35am- I meet with success, as my Hard Drive is now operational.

11:36am- I notice my Win XP load time is about a minute plus, 6 times the usual amout
11:38am -Still haven’t played half life 2 yet.
11:40am- check my hard drive, imagine my surprise when Disk manager shows me that my drive is 59% fragmented. Obviously I defrag

11:41am- begin defrag
11:59am -23% complete
12:21pm- 100% complete

It is now 12:30pm I hold my breath and Start HL2

12:31pm- I get a Nice out of focus picture before Crashing Back to desktop.
12:32pm- Take 4 aspirin and take 15 minutes to think (Meaning I Jerked off to relieve my frustration and took a dump)
12:47pm- feeling refreshed I try once again to start hl2 and to my surprise it starts.
12:48pm- while setting up my options, keeping things conservative going with recommended settings, I hit the apply button and I am greeted by a looping sound for 30 seconds before crashing back to windows.
12:50 -since I am using XP pro I checked my monitor, to find a miscellaneous Application error report, since I don’t speak Hexadecimal this does me no good.
1:01pm -I now am mildly miffed, try once more to start the game and low and behold I get to the opening train sequence.
1:02pm- notice a dramtic stutter in the same places in the G-mans speech (a-a-again, w-w-w-world) I ignore this for the time being and begin to play.
1:07pm- the mind blowing graphics are cool but being the audiophile that I am the skipping are getting annoying.
1:27pm- almost 20minutes of game play, you would think I was in the clear….wrong, wrong, wrong
1:27pm- Memory Could at such and such Not be Read at such and such, Application Terminated
1:28pm- Expletive Deleted Expletive Deleted Expletive Deleted Expletive Deleted Expletive Deleted Expletive Deleted Expletive Deleted Expletive Deleted Expletive Deleted
1:45pm- I look to guidance in these hallowed forums, I am relieved to find that I am not the only one.
2:39pm- after writing down so tweaks I begin to implement them.
Beta Nvidia Drivers-10 min
Via 4in1 Hyperion-4 min
Audigy Drivers-4 min
Edit Config File- 2min
3:00pm- I start the game stuttering is reduced greatly but still present
3:18pm- Crash: Memory error
3:19pm- start HL2
3:39pm -Crash: Memory errot

At this point in time I am now miffed, debate on whether or not to get refund.

3:45pm- I go drastic and remove one of my 512meg sticks of RAM, this involved all the unpleasantness of unplugging and plugging back in a lot of wires.

4:00pm -Take more aspirin and fire up HL2

4:02pm -Load Times are noticeably worse and the stuttering is back big time.
4:05pm -Lowered Graphics, Sound, Textures, and resolution, to med settings
4:06pm -I take a moment to realize the irony in buying a 400 dollar, 16-pipe Graphic card with 256megs of RAM and being forced to use these settings. I Chuckle when I reflect on how I ran Doom3 in Ultra mode and Far Cry with all the settings maxed at 60+fps.
4:40pm- 34min without a crash, (note to self:800x600 looks like (Expletive Deleted) on my 19inch)
4:41pm- Water Hazard Third Load Screen Crash
4:43pm- same place, memory crash
4:45pm- crash, same place
4:47pm -Expletive Deleted Expletive Deleted Expletive Deleted Expletive Deleted
5:00pm -Uninstall Game
5:05pm -Defrag
5:10pm -try a fresh install
5:20pm -.Cab error, installation aborted- WTF
5:21pm- retry install, completes.
5:30pm- much faster install and verification, still defrag afterwards, only 23% fragmented
5:45pm- Launch game
5:50pm- Configured in game options start game
5:51pm- “…your time has c-c-c-come again”, exit game tweak config
6:02pm- Game starts no stuttering, looks like crap because textures are set to low
7:05pm- Water Hazard Third Load Screen….crash, it crashes, it *ucking crashes
7:07pm- return to Forums and try to download game files from steam
9:10pm- 4.5gigs in 2hours, am very happy that Adelphia doesn’t charge bandwidth usage fees
9:12pm- my lab partner call me asking why I wasn’t in class, I give him the lowdown, he reply was that I was stupid. I agree with him.
Have been Working for 12 hours on this and have very little to show for it. I resolve not to play until it has been patched.
10:12pm- I lose my resolve and begin working the problem again
10:15pm- start with the basics (Can We Say Reformat)
11:15pm- Complete Reinstall of windows XP, had problems with activation, to many upgrades I guess, I will fix that later.
11:20pm- Drivers, Drivers, and More Drivers, all the latest and greatest.
11:30pm- Install From CDs
11:50pm- Launch game- to my surprise it works, still cannot make it past the third load screen at the water hazard, without memory crash. Expletive Deleted
What I gained from all this
1. The game now works with Medium Textures, at any resolution, 1600x1200 is smooth High Textures still result in massive stuttering, even if resolution is set to 640x480
2. The skipping is there but hardly noticeable
3. Sound is good, no pops or clicks

I then Spend the next two days installing all my various other programs and MP3s
I leave for Thanksgiving Break, I do NOT take my PC with me
Upon my return today Steam updates HL2
I can now get past the third load screen. I am a happy man.
So The game runs good for a hour, I use this information and I decide to put my other 512 back in to give me my Gig o RAM. That takes 10minutes and a lot of hassle
15minutes later…crash “memory can not be read”
Try again..same results.
Figure BIOS problem, flash with 1.004 revision from Asus.
NOW, now I can play with High textures, and no skipping however…THE GAME STILL (Expletive Deleted) CRASHES with a Memory Error
Tried running mem-manager in backround…crashed
Increased my latencies…crash
Lowered them…crash
Tried DDR-333…crash
DDR-266…crash
Tried swapping RAM sticks in different slot configurations…crash
Tried the heapsize 512000 command…crash
Tried the heapsize 384000…crash
Tried Optimal Mode in BIOS…crash
Tried Aggressive Mode in BIOS…crash
Tried Auto Settings in BIOS…crash
Tried a Sacrifice to the Heathen Gods…crash
Tried a BIOS setting called RAM Interleave Mode…and it works, it works, it works. THANK YOU GOD, IT WORKS

After my entire ordeal, it is 1:08am in the morning and I am able to run HL2 the way God…I mean the Gabe intended it to be run. As of right now I have gone 6 Hours with all settings maxed at 1600x1200. But if one where to ask, “Was it worth it all?” My answer would be HELL YES.
Bryophytesd AKA gordon13

 

[vsop]

To everybody (including myself...)

check out this test HardOCP did with a SLI config and some HL2 benches..

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Njk2LDU=

They even have the stutter bug with this system:
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (nForce4), AMD Athlon 64 FX-53, 2 x 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LLPro TwinX Dual Channel DDR400, Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150, Windows XP Professional SP2 with DirectX 9.0
AND : 6800 GT in SLI config! so 2 freaking top notch videocards!

Valve better get the patch out soon....

 

[Malanthius]

Agreed!

My experience with the patch is very similar to Mark McWilliams' (the guy doing a great job keeping tabs on the problem with his blep.net website).

Quickie specs (P4 3.1c, 9800pro, Gig-O-Ram, Audigy LS) 2xAA, 2xAF. Water Reflections Medium, Rest set to high. 1024x768 resolution, 85hz. 5.1 SRS.

---

In areas where I previously had a 3-5 second load stutter, they've been greatly reduced. Some down to half a second. But Valve's patch comes with a heavy price. In my case a 20+ fps drop in certain areas. The intro with the G Man illustrates the contrast nicely. With mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware turned off (pre patch conditions?) I average 50-70fps with a low point of 40 during the intro. But I still get the infamous stutter. When I turn this on the intro barely stutters at all. However it averages 35 fps with a low point of 20. To make matter worse whenever I get those nasty dips into the low 20's (which didn't happen at all before the patch) i start getting horrible audio feedback (pops, crackle etc) to go along with it. Ive corresponded with a couple X800XT users who've had similar audio feedback after the patch, only theres happend at a 40FPS threshold instead. Very odd.

So basically its a tradeoff. If I want the stuttering problem reduced to a mere nuisance I have to play the game with nearly half of it's performance in tact (and an audio bug at low framerates to boot). Thats not gonna work for me.

This wouldn't be so frustrating if Valve actually had some communication with their own community. All we want to know is the status of the problem, what they're working on and what progress they are making. Even if they're not making any progress at all, we deserve to know. If they're not going to be able to balance out these issues then I'd at least like to get word so I can get a refund. The game simply isn't playable in this state.

Same thing for me here. I know 2 other people who bought this game and they have the exact same problems! They have never posted here and probably will not ever because they don't DO forums. I don't normally post but I do read.

Now I have to think that the number of people out there that are like my friends have to be 10 fold! So this does not seem like a small or isolated problem!

Game worked fine on my sons computer I built from my old parts before the patch!

Our specs...

Mine
xp3200
abit AN7 mb
1gig pc3200 kingston
ATI 9800xt pro 256megs
2x 200 gig maxtor 7200 8meg buff hds.
audigy 2

Sons
xp3000
gigabyte mb (cheap one from FRYs)??
1 gig pc2700 corsair
ATI 9700 all in wonder pro 128meg
40gig maxtor hd 7200
Sound blaster! live

 

[dogboy73]

check out this test HardOCP did with a SLI config and some HL2 benches..
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Njk2LDU=

Valve better get the patch out soon....

Yeah I saw a link to this on the Steam forum thread. I think this proofes it's not a problem due to lack of power!

 

[TEDR]

one of my drives is udma 5 and the other udma 6 ..whats difference between them. half life is on udma 6 drive

 

[MotoR31]

Well i managed to fix my problem (i still dont beleive it!)

My hard drive was using SATA with an Abit serellel adaptor that came with my motherboard, i changed it to IDE master on the primary channel and ran it in 'Ultra DMA 5 - Ultra 100'
Now there's no stuttering and load times are much faster...

I suspect this fix is more of a bandaid than a real fix tho.

 

[Shinobi]

well here's the weird thing, and I've mentioned this before but it's becoming more and more aparent,,,,

it's always exactly specific areas where my game stutters to almost a crash like the alley when you first enter the outdoors of the city in HL2 or the astrolabe in piranesi in CS source

the funny thing is on one of the cs source levels (cobble I think) I have absolutely no problems at all,, maybe there are some block entities that are loading zones or something??

 

[MotoR31]

Funny you should say that. In ravenholm it playes perfect, no stuttering and high framerate. However i'm now up to the part with the snipers in the city and stuttering is just as bad as before. Stuttering seems to only occur in certain parts and maps.

 

[MotoR31]

Anyone elses HL2 just do a major update? I'm waiting for mine to finish so i can test it.

 

[Naris]

Umm.. Update seems to have some issues.....

 

[Naris]

Often Software Development is more of a black art than a science and oftentimes -- well -- stuff happens... Sometime you go insane attempting to find out why certain things just don't work and, of course, it works just fine on your system -- just not on anybody else's. I have experienced this frustration before and I have a feeling there are several people at Valve feeling this pain now...

Hopefully, they will be able to figure out something in the not too far future.

These are good reasons NOT to whine too much when the new game you desire is delayed (better late than a forced release -- and placing developers on death marches to release by a certain date often causes screwy errors to creep into the system as they rush to finish it ASAP)...

 

[JediPunisher]

The intermittent slowdown associated with the 1st patch seems to have been fixed in the newest patch However, the occasional hitch is still present when new sounds load… If only Valve would increase the 16MB sound cache (CAsyncWavDataCache) to 64MB, I think all of our problems would be solved. I also noticed that previously recorded demos no longer function.

Don't forget to defrag your hard drive after this update.
And make sure r_fastzreject is enabled, which is disabled by default on ATI cards. I tested this before with little effect, but now I get a boost anywhere from 0 to 100%, with an average timerefresh boost of 10-15fps.

Overall I’m happy with the latest patch, and the game is playable with the small audio hitches… but I want it perfect. Valve isn't off the hook yet.

 

[Frankie1984]

well i'm certainly happy over this patch... no more stuttering.... it may come from the point that the game doesn't start at all..... but what the hell.... *tragic*

 

[CR0M]

)stuff

That's what beta testing is for, to iron out these glitches. This release feels like it's still in the beta stage, and now apparently a patch that stops the game running at all? things are looking up :|